


Can you sing the lore of a place that no longer exists (without seeming like an archeologist)?

by jeanquirieplus (wireless)



Category: Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:30:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wireless/pseuds/jeanquirieplus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spil mir up a libes lidl, Keyn Amerike tzu kumen, hob ikh keyn mi geshport.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can you sing the lore of a place that no longer exists (without seeming like an archeologist)?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tiboribi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiboribi/gifts).



_“This song flows within man’s ephemeral shell like the waters of eternity. It washes away everything, it gives birth to everything.” Isaac Babel_

 _Spil mir up a libes lidl, Keyn Amerike tzu kumen, hob ikh keyn mi geshport._

 

Some days he goes to the reservoir on the north edge of Halifax. It’s at the foot of some undecided hills, not very tall, with scrubby pines. It’s a few days before Christmas, and the city is bustling with it in its own modest way- the people here are serious-faced, pale fishermen with no patience for holiday decadence. But the war has been over for two years now, and the world is healing. The notion is unbearable to him, and so he takes himself away whenever he can. The hills are ageless, and they don't remember or forget the scars that people inflict upon each other. This is comforting to him.

There is snow on the ground. It lays like a layer of cotton over the landscape, muffling its indigenous sounds. It is whiter than the snow was in Prague, undisturbed except for the occasional animal track out here. His feet are frozen to his shoes, but cold is now a theoretical concept to him. If arranged in a tablature where the absolute is the Kelvinator and the depths of the Moldau are a mid-range point, with the disappearance of his brother somewhere in between, then Joe has been cold for years and with no end in sight. The coarse wool weave he wears and any other insulation notwithstanding, it is a natural state for him. He is beginning to think he has chosen it. It is a way of orphaning himself entirely, because in the extreme he can forget the particulars of how it is he came to be alone.

The snow is luminous, the refractory light of the moon creating an opalescent mirror-daylight. The water of the reservoir, so close, is calm and black, like a glass, and utterly unlike the Moldau (or indeed any other river he has ever seen- the East was more sludge than water, however even _it_ could move at a brisk lap on occasion). Smetana's symphonic poem pops into his mind, full of scratches from one memorable morning learning to use his father's gramophone, and he thinks maybe. Maybe any water could be alive. He scuffs the toe of his ankle high boots into the mud, and thinks maybe there is a Golem here. Half a Canadian Golem, wished up by a half-dead wandering Jew out of sedentary lake mud, not enough soul between them to power a full human. But why not? He can't resolve himself to bend down and scoop up the dirt. He has been too disappointed, he will not try.

Joe huffs out a stream of condensation, fishes into his great-coat with blue fingers and pulls out a bent, indiscriminately rolled cigarette and a match. It’s so cold the match won’t light and when it finally does he has to cradle it with his frozen hands to keep it from going out. It flares as he takes a long, careful drag, the tip of the cigarette glowing orange. He thinks of other men, not so long ago, who would light a cigarette, place it between their fingers and then raise the limb over the wooden edge of a trench, waiting for no man's land to make the decision for them. As the haze of nicotine settles over him, a light febrile sort of desperation makes him look up at the twisted limbs of a tree some meters ahead, its black branches reaching up into the sky like a scar.

He never thought, before, to look up at the facade of buildings. He wishes he had, wishes he’d imprinted the black lace of Prague into the capacious box of his memory with more care. The houses stood sentinel in his mind, lining the streets like the edges of a complicated doily, entirely unlike the simple wooden structures here in Nova Scotia. The permanence he’d lent them as a child seems laughable to him now. Just like the brocaded interior of his father’s study, or the sudden whiff of his mother's perfume, or Korblum's mannerist story-telling. The low murmur of the Yeshiva, something he'd barely known and certainly hadn't appreciated. He should have listened. Perhaps if he had he would have the words to eulogize his solitude. Perhaps there would be solace in the chanting. Thousands of miles and several lifetimes away, he misses this thing he never really knew. "Contemptible," he whispers with a snort, Kornblum's words like a slap from the past.

The impermanence of memory is something to rage against, something for which masked avengers and escape artists have no time. His creation, Sammy’s creation, had been the product of a new world, one with so little past to use as currency. He had been so desperate to fight that he hadn't stopped to _remember_ , in fact he'd actively guarded against it, as if losing himself in the echoes in his old life and its vast tapestries would have crippled him. But now, at the end of all things, shivering in his moth-eaten great coat in the hills of Nova Scotia, now if he thinks about it remembering might well be the new fight. All the things they wanted to destroy, he could throw them back into the world with such baroque flourishes that they could never possibly be erased. He could repopulate the world with the images he had locked out of the coffin that had carried him away from Czechoslovakia.

The smoke from his cigarette curls up into the frigid air like the patterns on the scrolls he never looked at in the antechambers of the synagogue. It rises up in tendrils like the wisps of the beards of the elders of Prague. He can spend his entire life blackening squares on Bristol board with the chimera he’s been left with. Perhaps that is what he really meant when he made his masked hero the keeper of a key.

His fingers are too numb to ash the cigarette properly, and a tiny spark lands on his sleeve, burns a hole there. It has started snowing again. Below, in the city, there are thousands of little lights. The bells sound more often this time of year. He remembers the bells of Saint Vitus, the way the big church had scared him when he was small, with its angry rock figures etching up into the fog, brandishing weapons at the passers-by. But then there had been a figure, a giant dumb clay figure with a cipher on its forehead who had emerged from the mist of the Moldau to protect his people. Maybe he can make a new one, out of graphite. Maybe he will.

Of course he will. Who is he kidding? He will turn and fight the only way he knows.

 

 _“I watch the fingers of my teacher, I imitate him, I retain in my mind the path my fingers have to follow on my German guitar to bring these Jewish tunes back to life._

 _That gives me the  feeling of nestling in my hands a few nearly cold embers and carefully blowing on them to try to make them burn once again.  
_

 _And when the song gets off to a good start, I tell myself that something about it is still alive._

 _People have been explaining the Jewish people to me since I’ve been able to speak and I still don’t know for sure what it is we’re talking about. What I do know, though, is that those from the 'Poyln', from the land of 'Ashkenaz', they no longer exist at all.” -Fred Vandebeer, from the notes to “Klezmer”, by Joann Sfar._

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in a Frankfurt hostel. Frankfurt is a city without a past since it was almost entirely leveled by the allied bombing campaign. The people of the city have done a remarkable job of rebuilding the important monuments, but the result is a little lopsided because they remain copies of structures that had had a life and are now just modern replicas. I suspect Joe would have sympathized.
> 
> Title from the graphic novel "Klezmer", by Joann Sfar.


End file.
